287 posts categorized "Conferences"

September 25, 2008

The winner of the Picnic Green Challenge 2008 was announced today at the Picnic conference in Amsterdam (I have served as member of the jury and hosted the finalists' presentations today).

The four finalists were:

Greensulate, an insulation material made of agricultural and other organic waste bound by organic resins (fungi) and designed to remplace synthetic products such as styrofoam in construction, packaging and more. Project submitted by Ecovative Design of the US and presented in the finalists' round by CEO Eben Bayer.

RouteRank, a web tool that finds the best routes, integrating road, rail and air transport, and ranks them according to the criteria defined by the users, such as duration, cost and CO2 emissions. Project submitted by RouteRank of Switzerland and presented by CEO Jochen Mundinger.

Smartscreen, a shading system for windows and glass facades built with smart material and which doesn't require any electricity to operate. Project submitted by DeckerYeadon in New York and presented by architect Peter Yeadon.

VerandaSolar, plug-and-play solar panels that can simply attach to windowsills or balconies, allowing anyone even with space constraints to use solar energy. Project submitted by VerandaSolar of the US and presented by co-creator Capra J'neva.

And the winner is ... well, there were two. Greensulatewas declared the winner of the PGC08 -- and received the 500'000 euros of the prize, offered by the Dutch Postcode Lottery (the money will have to be used to develop the tecnology). But the jury surprised everybody by creating a special runner-up prize of 100'000 euros that went to VerandaSolar. (In the picture, Bayer and J'neva; Press release here.)

September 24, 2008

(Running notes from the Picnic conference in Amsterdam. I will be moderating several sessions, so will be blogging the conference only partially.)

Charles Leadbeater (author of "We-Think" -- watch his TEDtalk) is the opening speaker and talks about the new dynamics of creativity and innovation. He shows a video from YouTube with a kid playing guitar (face of the kid covered with a cap), which got 49 million views. "Imagine this kid trying to get a meeting with the BBC's head of entertainment: he would never get past the entry door". "The traditional media landscape is like a beach with boulders, the BBC boulder, the News Corp boulder; some sometimes join to create even biggest boulders. Now the beach is a rising tide of pebbles, and many people are coming and dropping their pebble on the beach: basically we are all in the pebble business now. The models of the future are about how we link these pebbles together to create added value, to create something that it's more than a loose assembly. Can we match a growing capacity to participate, to contribute, with our ability to collaborate, to build, to make more complex and durable products?"Charles tells the story of ILoveBees, the viral game/teaser used in 2004 to launch the videogame Halo 2 (see the detailed story on Wikipedia) and which gathered 600'000 participants. "If we take this newfound capacity for collaboration and we attach it to worthy goals, what could that yield? What we've got are new options, new ways of organizing ourselves. Most creativity is collaborative anyway, it comes from people mixing and blending ideas together. But not all collaboration yields creativity". What prompts collaborative creativity?

Diversity.

New and easy ways to allow people to contribute.

Ways to connect people together and to build on one-another.

A shared sense of purpose and some individual sense of payoff, that they're getting something in return as they're contributing to something larger.

Usually there is a core or kernel that's put there to begin with (the initial Linux software for ex)

Structure: these communities won't work unless they can make decisions, so they need to have some elements of structure (think Wikipedia).

Charles describes how the scientific process is developing. "Science is increasingly a hugely collaborative activity, even very specific scientific activities. If you look at the kind of tools young scientists and engineers are using to collaborate, you get a glimpse into the future. What these lead users are telling us is that the future is all gonna be about our activity to collaborate, to pull together the diversity of knowledge and insight that we need to make that possible". What does that mean? "For most of my life, we have worked and being served by organizations that should do things for you but often actually do things to you. The logic of the Web is "with", how to work with people, how to learn together. If you want a very simple way to think of the current shift, it's that difference: from the world of "to" and "for" to the world of "with" and "by"." "Is this just a passing moment, a fleeting fad? Or is it a possible permanent change in how we organize ourselves? And if it is, can we use that possibility or are we going to screw it up?" "Somebody recently asked to Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the Web: are we asking too much of the Internet, are we loading too much onto it, bearing the weight of this social transformation? Tim answered: the danger is that we will ask too little from it, that we will reduce it to just another tool".

Clay Shirky ("Here comes everybody" - watch his TEDtalk) comes on stage for a conversation with Leadbeater. They agree that this movement won't be instantaneous: "We've lived the first 10 years of a transformation that will take maybe another 50 years to deploy", says Leadbeater.

Aaron Koblin is the next speaker. He is an artist focusing on the creation and visualization of human systems. "Data systems tell stories about our lives", he says. He talks about several of his projects: the Flight Patterns, the New York Talk Exchange (check it out: shows which cities are communicating with New York over 24 hours, very insightful); the "Sheep Market" project, 10'000 sheep(one of which on the image) drawn by random strangers using Amazon's task-distribution mechanims Mechanical Turk. He "collected" 11 drawings per hour over 40 days; the quickest "artist" took 4 seconds, the slowest 46 minutes (average: 105 seconds). Another project: Ten Thousand Cents, which asked people to participate in making a drawing without knowledge of the overall project (it was a reproduction of a 100 dollars bill, but everybody only got to reproduce a tiny bit, a "cent"). He talks about House of Cards, where lasers and sensors are used to scan the band Radiohead into a three-dimensional particle-driven data experience -- a very different kind of videoclip... (see videos here on YouTube, or get the code here and play with it). And finally he shows a recent project mapping out SMS usage in Amsterdam based on KPN data. (BG: great projects, but a little frustration: Aaron doesn't draw any conclusion, any insight from this work and its impacts/meanings).

September 05, 2008

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I am moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Jan Chipchase, designer and researcher and anthropologist for Nokia Design, opens the session talking about his work studying how people use technology and how they're influenced by it. Running notes.More and more of what we use in daily life becomes pocketable, you carry it in pockets and bags.Pocketable is a step towards technology becoming invisible: we are going to not see alot of technology; not invisible in the sense that it's disappearing into the infrastructure, but in the sense that you will be using it without other people noticing or knowing that you're using it.When you have objects in people pockets that have similar functionalities, you're gonna see alot of serial solitary interaction (two people watching the same video each on his cell phone, one beside the other, for instance). There is alot of buzz about sharing -- about YouTube, MySpace, etc. Sharing is inherently human, is generally socially positive, but when you adopt that technology it can raise a question of whether you're opting out of society.In an era of mass production, tech is getting into people's hands at a younger and younger age: the distance between their social norms and ours (adults) is widening.Christian Lindholm (wireless guru from Finland) asks: what do digital nomads tell us about the future? Defining mobility: contextual variables; ergonomic variables; physical variables:

The product-maker has to create beauty. What is beauty? Roman architect Vitruvius in 30 BC said: A structure must exhibit firmitas (solid, rugged), utilitas (utility) and venustas (beauty). Another architect, Leon Battista Alberti, defined beauty in 1435: "The adjustment of all parts proportionally, so that one can not add, subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole". But you also have to have "oréos", the greek word for "beauty of one's hour", timely beauty.The Apple iPhone is beautiful, but it really still feels like a prototype.To see the future, look at the present. We interviewed a group of "elite nomads", the bleeding edge of global travelling users. Here some of the findings:

Data-roaming costs stifle demand; people downgrade to pure voice; they carry several prepaid SIM cards. Reliable Internet connection is like a shade under a palmtree for these digital nomads, it's comfort. Coffee, wi-fi and friends is an invaluable combination for these digital nomads.

Battery life is a constant worry for them. Battery life is the number 1 enemy of convergence: basically everything already works, except that all-in-one runs out of batteries. Power is the digital water. People go to ridiculous length to find the power. What I see more and more is digital divergence -- a phone AND an iPod, separate devices -- and the main reason for this is to two batteries, so that you don't run out of juice in either (for the same reason many Blackberry users have also a cell phone: in order not to run out of battery in either calls or e-mail). My favorite mobile gizmo from Nokia from the last few years is the USB charger (Apple iPods also have one).

Laptops are the only one that are qualified as "tools" by these leading digital nomads; the phone is a read-only device. All the nomads were carrying laptops, and many had also Blackberries and phones and other devices.

This year is the year of bad touch screens (BG: picture of the iPhone behind the speaker). The reason why Apple is so phenomenal is because they have their own screen technology. But the natural evolution of the iPhone is a small sliding QWERTY keyboard. (BG: totally, totally agree: the iPhone will never become a business tool until the keyboard is there).

The Internet builds a base for stronger ties when meeting physically.

Takeshi Natsuno, the father of the first, functioning, successful, large-scale wireless internet system, Japan's i-Mode (there is a whole chapter about it in my book "Roam") also spoke in this session. Unfortunately no time to take notes on his speech.

A session with short presentations ("elevator pitches", really) by 6 young Swiss startups that were selected for a Korea entrepreneurs tour by AlpicT.

Pixelux Entertainment (represented by Raphael Arigoni) started in 2003 and does 3D software for entertainment and movies, based around the physical properties of the objects realized (they call the tecnology "digital molecular matter"). The results are spectacular: think of scenes where anything bends, fractures or breaks: objects realized with Pixelux technology deform and flex in a very realistic way, looking like they would do in the real world rather than looking cartoonish. Arigoni says that the tech also makes realizing these sequences cheaper. They've worked with LucasArt on the "StarWars - The Force Unleashed" game.

Arimaz (represented by Pierre Bureau) works on entertainment robotics. One of their products is Mydeskfriend, a small robot that looks like a Tamagotchi, connected to the Internet; it can read messages and RSS feeds, be a character in games, etc.

Secu4 (represented by Ralph Rimet) develops a protection system for valuables, based on wireless tech. 3300 laptops are forgotten, lost or stolen every week in the 8 biggest airports in the EMEA Europe, Middle East and Africa) zone. The idea of Secu4 is to insert a small bluetooth card, connected with a cell phone. For ex, put the card in your purse. If someone picks up the purse you've put besides your chair; or you forget it there and walk away; as soon as the purse-with-card is out of range (a few meters), the cell phone rings to alert you.

Poken (reprensented by Stephane Doutriaux) is a little keychain accessory. It's a funnily-designed USB key that lets you "touch" another person's poken to connect with that person in social networking sites almost automatically (plug in the USB and automatically upload your new connections, and there you go). It also captures a time stamp of the meeting.

Lighthouse (represented by Robert Tibbs) does security software for cell phones and wireless communications.

KeyLemon (represented by Gilles Florey) has developed an easy-to-use face- and speech-recognition software that can be used through a normal webcam. That allows continuous authentication by face recognition: your computer "recognizes" you. If someone else sits in front of your computer, the software locks it. The software can be downloaded for free from the KeyLemon site (Windows only for now; Mac under development, cell-phone version too, although it needs more powerful processos).

Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design in San Francisco says: We live in the contrast between infinite human potential and finite Earth resources. There are almost 3 billion mobile phone subscribers in the world, 5 time more than computer.If there are 3 billion mobile phones out there, there are 3 billion chargers. Energy is lost when the phone is fully recharged but the phone is still plugged into the charger (recharging a phone generally requires less than 2 hours, but many people plug them in overnight for example, or keep them plugged all day at the office). Nokia is testing new designs to automatically switch off the charger after the phone is charged.Once we have digged all the resources from the underground, we will have to learn to produce with what's already above ground -- recycling, re-making. Is it possible to create a cell phone using nothing new? (He shows the "Remade" prototype).How do we encourage people to keep things longer? Another project explores how you can update devices digitally, rather than physically; made to last; encouraging a "culture of caring".

On a side note, Grignani announces a new project: Fivedollarcomparison.com, a site asking people to submit example of objects or else that cost the equivalent of 5 dollars. Such as these:

Adam Greenfield, of Nokia Design, talks about "the long here, the big now and other tales of the networked city". It's not a tech talk, it's about the emotional aspects of living in a networked city: what it's gonna feel to live there?I think we can get a decent idea about it by looking at the way people right now are using mobile phones and other contemporary digital artifacts. With mobile we are edging already into a truly ubiquitous experience, "mobiquity".One of the very first things that I think we can get rid of is the notion that the physical element is the sovereign element in our life. No longer are our choices dictated by the physical space. Think at when we walk around in a shopping mall talking on the phone: our movements are not determined by the architecture around us: it's determined by "where we are", that is, on the cell phone. Dogma: that which primarily conditions choices and actions in the city is no longer physical, but has become the invisible and intangible overlay of networked information that enfolds in the city.These are some of the potentials that I see happening:- the long here: layering a persistent and retrievable history of the things that are done and witnessed in a place, onto that place (example: Oakland Crimespotting project; Flickr geotagging, giving geographic coordinates -- GPS -- to pictures), - the big now: locally, making the total. real-time option space "massively parallel", giving you a sense of all the potential of a city (examples: London's Making bridges talk, by Tom Armitage: hooking up bridges with sensors and interfaces to the web so that they can twit -- Tower Bridge twittering and blogging when it's opening and closing; the idea is for the city to tell what the city is doing; or the New York Talk Exchange, mapping incoming and outgoing phone traffic from and to NY.- the soft wall: there are less happy consequences, inevitably these technologies will be used to deny or degrade a space, to exclude people, to make them difficult to find, to put them under surveillance, for differential permissioning (some are allowed in, others not).We will see new patterns of interaction: information about cities and patterns of their use will be visualized in new ways made available locally, on-demand and in a way that can be acted upon (ie. via mobile devices). Nothing in the world is as interesting and useful as information about one place, when you are actually in that place.We will also see the emergence of addressable and scriptable surfaces around us: façades as interfaces, etc.We are moving from browsing urbanism to search urbanism. That's really gonna change the way we use the city, from passive consumers of reality to active users of it. What kind of places will those cities turn out to be will be up to us.Where will this happen first? As Mimi Ito says, every culture has an "alternative technologized modernity", which is proper to it. Each place needs to have to make its own choices about this. Every bus in Helsinki for ex is a Linux server that is constantly broadcasting information about the bus' whereabouts.

Interactive cities visionary Jeff Huang (from EPFL) asks: how can we merge digital/social/interactive technologies with our physical cities to foster better communities? This is a fundamental design question. Good cities is an emergent phenomenon if you get the design of the underlying architecture right. What is really lacking is the way technologies are applied in cities, they're often wrongly designed. The most obvious appearance of ubiquitous technologies are essentially surveillance cameras and media facades (big electronic billboards used to bombard people with commercial messages -- see Times Square). You can compare what's happening in cities with the first generation of what happened on the Web: at the beginning companies had web pages to advertise their products to users; but the Web has moved along. If I had to summarize in one sentence what we have trying to do when we are designing a project for the interactive city, is to push it towards a more empowered, social medium (from passive consumer to empowered urbanite). Project Listening Wall: a project to give walls ears, so that they can listen to what's happening in the room.Project Swiss House/Swissnex: a network of 22 "nodes" around the world for Swiss scientists/researchers/creators abroad to connect back to the homeland: each of the buildings are connected, and even "collapsed" (looking at the wall in one is like looking into the space of the other, because that wall is a connected big screen).Project Seesaw connectivity: learning a new language in airports.Project Beijing Newscocoons(in the picture above): a set of pulsating objects that live and breathe, displaying
user-generated video clips, pictures, stories, and blogs from
geographically distant sources and that interact with the people surrounding them.So the answer to the original question (how to merge digital/interactive with physical cities to foster better communities?): go beyond the passiveness of media facades and surveillance cams; go from passive to interactive, to social, to co-creator; tap into the social and tactile dimension; there are issues (good business model or public good?) and sustainability questions.

Soo-In Yang, a Korean architect working in NY, works on how buildings communicate with each other. Talks about his "Living City" project, a project to link buildings to one another so they can "talk" and share information and even sometimes take collective action. For example we know that in Korea the sand blowing over from China are a problem: so imagine if the buildings on the eastern part of the city could "warn" the buildings downwind so that they could "get ready". These things are possible because of advancements in ubiquitous computing, sensors and chips and wireless connectivity are becoming cheaper, etc. Other idea: experiment with air and building facades as public spaces. Air is something that everybody shares in a city; measuring and communicate its quality allows to take action. Buildings can be owned by individuals but facades are more difficult to "own" because it belongs in the street. Facades could really become alive and sense things and communicate things and become interactive, that's a further space we could become an ecology of information and interaction. (Seoul, btw, has sensors measuring air quality, and public information diplays and maps sharing the information in real time).

September 04, 2008

(Running notes from LiftAsia08, in Jeju, Korea. I'm moderating this session, so only partial blogging.)

Dan Dubno -- technologist, broadcaster, producer, conference host (the invitation-only Gadgetoff), blogger (Gizmorama), pioneer in the use of graphic and visualization tools on television, and more -- is Mr Gadget. He is the opening speaker of the sustainable development session which, sponsored by WattWatt, is becoming a permanent feature of the Lift conferences. So Dan talks also about (and shows) "green" gadgets -- although, he says, clearly no gadget is really sustainable. Among the things he shows: Brunton solar displays, Solio solar charger ("Much of these things are not totally efficient, but they are symbols for what's possible"), the Kill-a-watt to monitor energy consumption, the Lightcap solar-power bottle, the Steripen to purify water,
a GPS cell phone for kids, the Clocky alarm clock for kids, a cell phone signal jammer, the TV-be-Gone that turns off all the remote-controlled TVs within range (imagine doing that in a sports bar in the middle of the action),
a USB microscope, the bluetooth sunglasses by Oakley, the Pleo animated dinosaur (image right), a handheld infrared camera, and the Celestron SkyScout telescope, a handheld device that uses GPS to point you to stars -- or to tell you what star you're looking at. "The only one you really need to get", Dan told me.

Philippa Martin-King is one of the people behind WattWatt, a community devoted to discussing and promoting energy efficiency, backed by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) and which features the competition for schoolchildren Care4it. Energy efficienty is the topic of her talk. Running notes: Korea is the seventh biggest consumer of energy in the world (after US, China, Japan, Germany, Russia and India). How do we waste electricity? Stand-by devices, lighting, air conditioning, refrigerators, lights on at home and at work, air-conditioning, refrigerators, etc. Almost 4% of energy in Switzeralnd is produced through burning waste. (BG: this surprises me, it's a rather high number).

Swiss adventurer Sarah Marquis has traveled the world by foot. Europe. Latin America. Australia. She's been walking, solo, for 17 years now, alternating one or two years of travelling and one or two of preparing for the next one, telling her story, and finding sponsors. She crossed Australia (the subject of her first book), traversed Latin America, went fom Mexico to Canada. Her talk is about reconnecting with nature and how to be autonomous when, say, walking across the Australian desert or the Cordillera Andina alone for weeks -- including, because of the many techies in the audience, how to travel in energetic independence. The picture behind her shows a flower in the Australian desert:

Running notes: My trip from Alice Springs to Alice Springs via a tour of Australia took me 17 months for 14'000 km. You cannot carry water and food for that much food, so you have to find it there, catch your own food (lizards, etc). You must be open, but you also need to be a bit hungry, and when you're really hungry you realize that you can do things, because you're ready for something else, for making a further step, even if you don't know what happens there. A journey in the bush starts with nature. After 4 months I get to a stage where I need to change my gear, I need to shower, to eat. So my brother came to meet me at a checkpoint. Why am I going alone? Because that journey is about understanding. When you are in those desert areas, where there is nothing, you learn step by step about yourself, about life, after one month I don't think the same thing than after two months. You can learn tricks before leaving (wrap a tree branch with a plastic bag, and harvest the condensed water; etc) or by observing the way animals do it. I started when I was 17, I did 30'000 km since, but it's not really about distance and performance: it's about what happens there -- hunting with the Aboriginals, for example. There is no real reason for walking -- but no reason for not walking, either. I carry camera, videocamera, GPS, flexible solar panels, I need technology. When you get to the end of a multiple-months 7000-km trip, after all the energy that you've put into it, you don't really want to get there. Next plan: from South Siberia walking across Mongolia, China, the Himalaya range, Nepal, India, Birmania, Malesia, Indonesia, and then back to Australia. I have one year to get ready. (BG: and she's looking for sponsors).

I'm spending the week on the island of Jeju, in Korea, for the LiftAsia08 conference. The volcanic island has spectacular sites -- lava tubes, tuff craters, dark-grey beaches, and a Unesco heritage mountain right in the middle, mount Hallasan -- and the population is inclined to kindness: the first street sign that you see upon leaving Jeju airport says "We love having you here". The slogan is repeated on billboards around the island, but this first one is not a billboard: it's a blue highway sign, suspended above the lanes, in three languages (English, Korean, and I guess Japanese), as if to indicate a direction.

The island is booming. The hotel we're staying at, on a cliff above the ocean, looks like a spaceship (it might be one: the toilet, called LooLoo, has an electronic command keyboard with 14 keys). The congress center is gigantic. The region proclaims itself "autonomous self-governing", and that's what the local authorities are trying to achieve: become to Korea something like what Hong Kong is to China. The food is an adventure -- and in this domain I'm of the non-adventurer, stick-to-Mediterranean-cuisine type, so I haven't got into the mood for live octopus and other similar delicacies yet. Nor I plan to.

The conference's theme is "Beyond the web browser". The room is full, there are about 400 attendees. After a welcome message from Jeju's governor Kim Tae-hwan, and a short introduction by Seo Young Roh, of the Art Center Nabi in Seoul (which has created some spectacular installations here, under the moniker "Lift Experience", Laurent Haug and Jaewoong Lee give the opening speech, offering an introduction to the conference and discussing "what a mature web will mean for our society". Haug is the founder of Lift (which takes place in Geneva every year, and of which I'm an adviser); Lee is a Korean entrepreneur, CEO of Daum communication, one of Asia's largest Internet platforms with over 40 million users -- Daum is one of the main LiftAsia sponsors.

Haug: The web is now mature, we have one billion user. Alot of things are happening; we have experiencing an overload of information and innovation; "relevant" is the new "new"; we're back to forms of hierarchy; we enter "casual everything", casual gaming, casual e-mail, casual news reading; etc. In a way, there is less innovation happening inside the browser.

Lee: The innovation today comes at the intersection of the individual, the computer and physical space. The online-offline frontier is blurred.

Eric Rodenbeck, of Stamen Design in SF, talks (and shows plenty) about the evolution towards "richer" media forms through the use of new types of information visualizations. Running notes: French physiologist Etienne-Jules Marey, mid-19th century, studied movement, juman and animal, particularly birds (he invented a "photographic gun" and other devices to capture movement). Things are different now, we deal with systems of organisms and not with individual motions, like the 1K Project, 1000 cars racing in 1000 videogame racing sessions and recorded all together. There is a vast amount of data that it's now generated "live" by each one of us.
Eric shows DiggLabs' "Swarm", showing what's happening in real time, what stories "grow" when people "digg" them, etc; Cabspotting, which tracks cabs in San Francisco, creating a map of the city (example at right) that's not based on the street grid, but on the actual activity of the taxis (based on the idea that the city is an organism, you can take the data, take the flows, and reveal the patterns that are hidden inside them).

Chang Kim, CEO of Korean blog hosting company TCN, talks about the future of the social web. (Korea btw has a 64% penetration of broadband). Running notes: The future of social media is a better homepage. Today there are too many destination sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc), but none of them are really mine or yours. To make matter worse, there are now apps and widgets. Before I just consumed content; now I'm creating content, and my content is scattered all around, and none of these sites are mine. It's like a hotel vs home experience. Today you check into these different "hotels"/destination sites managed by others; what we need is ownership, "home business", a true home where I can start and end my journey. The second problem is that data aren't really portable, copy/paste is not really efficient. Third problem: relationships online don't really model after real life; online you're either my friend or you're not, there isn't much nuance. The relationship on the web today is represented flatly. The only solution is different levels of trust. The fourth problem is that the places of content consumption and content authoring are different. Most power bloggers don't understand the fact that content authoring can be difficult for many people. I believe there is an emerging social networking fatigue.

The second session (which I'm moderating, so only limited blogging -- that will be the case for several sessions during this conference) features economist David Birch and sci-fi writer Bruce Sterling talking about the digitization of money and the emerging cashless economy.

Birch is a director of Consult Hyperion and a specialist of electronic business and banking (he was once described as "one of the most user-friendly of the UK's uber-techies"). Running notes: Cash doesn't work very well for many people. For example: cash costs too much (from the cost of withdrawing money from an ATM to fees for remittances etc) and these costs disproportionally fall on the poorest. In societies with cash-based economies (for ex Sweden) risks for robberies is higher. So don't take it for granted that cash is the best way of doing things. US: about 2/3 of all the US dollars in circulation, are not in the US. Being the person that issues the cash, it's a very good position to be: people basically give you an interest-free loan. The amount of dollars in circulation is actually falling. Cell phone in some countries has already become an alternative to cash payments, and even to plastic payments. Ex Japan, where operator DoCoMo has invested in Sumitomo bank to develop its payment systems. Other Asian cell-phone payment systems: G-Cash and Smart in the Philippines; E-tong in China; SKT Visa and KTF MasterCard in Korea; ETS and EZ-Link in Singapore. This demonstrates very clearly that consumers have no problems whatsoever with the idea of using their cell phone instead of cash or plastic cards. In Kenya: M-PESA, which has millions of users and signs up thousands of users a day (it's a system that allows to send Kenyan shilling from cell phone to cell phone). In other countries such as Congo, mobile-phone minutes have become an "alternative currency". If you're just talking about putting extra menus into a mobile phone, then you can try experiments, letting people choose among a series of possibilities for payments. In Latin America, branchless banks and shared agent networks in Brazil.

(Here a series of M-PESA screenshots showing how it works)

Let's assume that we replace cash with cell phones. Who whould be the winners? There would be economic growth (0.5%?). We may get reduced crime (no robberies). There would be reduced tax evasion. Banks: no more cash handling, filling ATMs, etc. And poor people would get rid of the weight of transaction charges.

American sci-fi writer and initiator of the cyberpunk genre Bruce Sterling is next. He has already addressed (on different topics) past LIFT conferences in Geneva twice, and is therefore a sort of unofficial LIFT resident big thinker. Running notes: Rather than talking about the hi-tech world of computing, I want to talk about the poor world, without computing. There are two kinds of poverty: the first kind is people that have no money, and the second kind is the people who can't make any money. The latter are going to remain poor, but there are alot of people that are very capable of making money but are shut out of that possibility by their current financial system. The new poverty is urban: peasants all around the world are living their land and moving into cities, places like Lagos, Sao Paulo, Mumbai. These poors have cell phones, there is no cell phone divide. People are really surprised, and even alarmed, at how eager the poor are to have cell phones. In India the cell phone user base in 2008 is expanding by 6 million people a month(and those are just accounts: typically a whole family would use a cell phone). There are people who can't read and buy cell phones. So these are not the "old" poor: these are big-city people, and like most people in big cities they're rather sophisticated. They just don't have money, they don't have banking services. But they do have some of these cell-phone-based payment services that David just described. This is disruptive innovation: it's not an add-on to the banks that rich people already have; this are millions of people being brought into a parallel financial system. These are not banks: I think we're seeing the invention of some kind of anti-bank, or even an anti-money, here. I suspect (BG: here Bruce addresses the Koreans in the audience) that your contribution will be in North Korea. Will the regime in North Korea collapse? Yes. When that happens, who can do something about it? South Korea of course. You will have to lift NK out of their poverty, and I don't think that you can do it with conventional economics and with these nice currency notes (He shows a 10'000-won note). They are poor and they have never had cell phones, but as soon as the regime collapses that's what they are gonna get: cell phones. And they will go to cities. Consider the historic example of Eastern and Western Germany: the West thought they could replace one economic and currency system with the other, but that didn't make them into capitalists. You will have to replace it completely. You will have to come up with some Korean electronic solutions for poverty. NK is not going to collapse tomorrow, but you should start preparing, to start thinking: when my fellow Korean from the North becomes free, what kind of technology should we put into his or her hands so that in ten years they become happy citizens?

June 06, 2008

Have an idea for a product, service or technology that can contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle, directly reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, is developed enough to be realizable within two years, and also scores well on convenience, quality and design?

That's the brief that the organizers of the second Picnic Green Challenge have put forth a few days ago -- accompanied with a prize of 500'000 euros (plus appended things such as coaching and business introductions) for the winner.

The Challenge is open until July 31st (detailed competition criteria and entry form). From the entries a preliminary jury will select three to five finalists, who will then present their ideas publicly on September 25 at the Picnic08 conference in Amsterdam (Disclosure: I'm a member of the jury and will host the final presentation). The jury is chaired by Sir Richard Branson. The prize money comes from the Dutch Postcode Lottery.

Last year, out of 439 green ideas the prize went to Dutch startup Qurrent, which has developed both a technology and an approach to favor local generation of renewable energy. I've e-mailed Igor Kluin, its CEO, for an update.

What happened to Qurrent and the QBox after you won the Picnic Green Challenge 2007? The impact of the PGC has been, and still is, enormous. The publicity has made the biggest impact, although the money has clearly helped too. The press has exposed Qurrent -- a startup -- to the world which has resulted in distribution requests from over 40 businesses from over 20 countries. Also, the PR has given us credibility which in turn opens doors that would have remained closed. Our goal was to realize 3 to 5 pilots in 2008 and we already have 4 signed and many more in the pipeline. The money has allowed us to scale up, speed up and really get of the ground. Since we will require more cash in the future, it has also favored our position with potential financiers.

Has the first project been realized? We started installing the first Qboxes just three weeks ago so I don’t have many details just yet. It is thrilling though to see the product come to life, in action on location.

What are the first results of these deployments, from the perspective of the users?In the first pilots we are concentrating on testing the stability of the core of the system. The end user is not yet involved in the current pilots. This will follow at the end of this year. We expect to start implementing real projects at the beginning of 2009, ahead of the PGC target of two years.

Among the other finalists of last year's Green Challenge, Damian O'Sullivan's Solar Lampion was featured in the NY MoMA exhibit "Design and the Elastic Mind", which closed just a couple of weeks ago, while The Green Thing continue to nudge people towards a most sustainable daily behaviour. Co-founder Andy Hobsbawm e-mailed me this update:

The Green Thing's video content has been viewed 1.25m times on the web and the site has had 112,152 unique visitors from 162 countries doing 23,118 different green actions and saving 2,808.56 tonnes of CO2. (We believe the actual figure is higher because only a small percentage of people who come into contact with Green Thing or subscribe tell us they've done stuff but our research shows it does influence wider behaviour). All people powered by love rather than money, and word of mouth: not a penny has been spent on marketing so far.

We've just started Green Thing Groups which allows corporates to set-up employee groups on the site. Companies who have agreed to do this so far include Nokia, Carphone Warehouse, Betfair, McDonalds and TBWA. It's a good way to engage individuals within corporations. We've high hopes this will increase reach and eventually generate donations/contributions from the brands.

For more on last year's finalists, read Susan Kish's report on their final presentations in front of the jury.

May 14, 2008

Elmar Mock believes that "most people talk of innovation but what they actually do, is renovation". He should know: in 1980 Mock, together with fellow engineer Jacques Müller, co-invented the Swatch, the plastic watch that started the rescue -- and led to the current triumph -- of the then-depressed Swiss watchmaking industry, which was suffering in particular from the competition of Japanese digital watch manufacturers such as Seiko.

Mock and Müller sketched out the lightweight, iconic, fashionable and colored plastic watch in May 1980. Codename of the first prototypes: "Delirium Vulgare". The first collection of 12 Swatch models went on sale in Zurich in 1983. The key engineering innovation of the Swatch was to use an integrated production technique that reduced the number of parts by half, to about 50; but the key design and marketing innovation was to put on the market a plastic watch that, at the beginning, met with legions of skeptics. But which went on to sell hundreds of millions of pieces -- the 333-million mark was past in 2006.

Mock (picture left) left Swatch in 1986 and to launch his own innovation firm, Creaholic, in Biel/Bienne, a city along the language divide between the German and the French parts of Switzerland, which someone dubbed "the Swiss Liverpool" for the industrial turmoil of the 1980s and the creative and economic renewal of the last 15 years. Mock will also be a keynote speaker at the upcoming Forum des 100 conference in Lausanne, which I've been producing.

I visited with Mock the other day at Creaholic's headquarter, nested in a former soap factory in the center of town: high ceilings, a suspended meeting room reachable through a short glass bridge, and plenty of room for the 30-something employees and partners. Creaholic has worked and works on a whole range of products, from hearing aids to ski gear, from packaging to flavors, from software to micromechanical devices. Their creative model is, says Mock, inspired by nature: ideas travel from a "gas phase", that of high-energy creativity, fantasy and dreams (and chaos), to a "liquid phase", where they start to coalesce and take a tangible form (here is where design comes into play, where thinking about usage and aesthetics are at work), to a "solid phase" where the value of the idea can be truly measured, and where the practical aspects of the development are dealt with (materials, production, industrialization).

The problem of innovation, says Mock, is in the love-hate relationship between the "gas" and the "solid" phases: it is in turning an intuition or a dream into an actual product that can "bring a timely business advantage" -- because competitive advantages, so thinks Creaholic, are always limited in time, and only constant innovation can keep you ahead.

Mock told me about some of the projects Creaholic has been working on, and one in particular, which is now a spinoff, caught my attention: WoodWelding. The starting point was some research into using thermoplastic elements (resins) to weld, reinforce or anchor wood. Said in very simple terms (I'm probably oversimplifying) WoodWelding's technology uses nails or seals or pegs made of synthetic resins as fixations. Put a resin nail into wood, for example and pass ultrasonic energy through it: the resin will start to liquefy and penetrate into the porous material. It then cools rapidly, resulting -- in a few seconds -- in a stable and durable bond. Look at the bottom item in the picture: the resin nail has basically "melted" into the wood, becoming "part" of it. This is applicable to most porous materials, such as chipboard, concrete, or paper.

The technology however had a slow start, and for what I know only one company has licensed the technology for things like cabinet and window assembly. However, the part that I found most interesting is that several companies have licensed it for medical applications. Because -- and this was nowhere in the inventor's initial thinking -- bones are also a very porous material, and the WoodWelding technology has turned out to be ideal for cranio-maxillofacial usage (welding a broken skull, for instance) or for orthopaedics.

This is a very telling example of how innovations often find their best/ideal applications outside their original field of reference -- and spotting this lateral opportunities (finding ideas and solutions outside your field, etc) is a key way to gain a competitive edge.